If you have been following these pages for any time, you might remember that I long derived part of my living from being pretty much a "professional beachcomber."
More specifically, I had the good fortune to live in a place where the presence of an old seaside trash dump — long abandoned — meant that I was able to find a vast array of interesting items on the beach all these years later.
I built a small business focused on selling old beach glass and pottery to artists and jewelers all around the world, and that went quite well for a number of years.
Of course, all good things come to an end and that was also true with this particular venture. Slowly the supply of interesting items just kind of dwindled to a trickle because people had learned that "there was some guy out there who was able to make a bit of money from beachcombing" and suddenly hundreds of people were doing it.
With nothing else to find, I slowly started to turn my attention elsewhere.
I never entirely shut down the beachcombing business, however, it was rather depressing to watch it go from a $40,000 a year venture to a $1,500 a year venture.
Thankfully, I didn't end up completely abandoning the beach, because I always needed to go out and find appropriate stones for my 
So now I am somewhat reinventing what I'm doing, keeping the beachcombing business while changing what's an offer from sea glass and pottery to unusual stones, seashells, and driftwood.
Although it's a new clientele, so far the change has been pretty well received and it doesn't hurt that my profile on Etsy says that I have been part of the community for 17 years!
Sorting today's haul into appropriate bins.
There are actually a lot of artists and crafts people who work with "found objects" of various kinds, and I am discovering that genuine driftwood that has been tumbled, rounded and bleached by the ocean is in quite high demand, especially with people who live a long way from the ocean.
I'm not exactly surprised, of course, since the vast majority of my former sea glass and pottery customers tended to live in the middle of the country hundreds and even thousands of miles from the coast.
Meanwhile, I have also discovered a microniche with striped rocks. They are apparently considered to be talismans of good luck, so I have started offering them as "wishing stones" and they are doing quite well! It has long fascinated me how people are willing to spend $8 on shipping to get a $5 item...
"Lucky" striped rocks are a thing!
While I have no expectations that this new variation on my beachcombing business is going to get anywhere close to where it once was, I'm grateful for even small amounts given the greatly uncertain world in which we currently live.
Even if few hundred dollars a month would be a great help to just enable us to get by and maybe buy a little more food or pay a couple of bills. Meanwhile, I get to walk on the beach and do something I really enjoy and that's probably as close to "retired life" as I'm ever going to get!
In the meantime, I'm very grateful for the fact that my health and my legs still allow me to walk and scramble across uneven ground and washed up logs for 4-5 hours without becoming completely exhausted!
The rootball of a washed up log is a form of Art, in its own right!
So that was today's work. Tomorrow it is time to continue working on our vegetable garden.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful weekend!
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2026.04.24 22:45 PST
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